From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
In my research spanning the last decade, it struck me that we might be conducting a massive, uncontrolled experiment on an entire generation of humans, without fully understanding the potential ramifications. We're all altering our behaviors due to the advent of mobile information, media, and communications technology.
Salman Abedi, Khalid Masood, Khuram Butt, all of these people and the people in ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab… We tend to think sometimes that they are extremism. But the reality is they didn't breed extremism. Islamist extremism bred them.
Disability – rather than being something looked upon as a 'condition', is really a phenomenon that occurs at a complex intersection between our humanity, policy, society, culture and the environment.
No one has to be a genius, but everyone has to participate.
I think the biggest technological innovation that will impact Wikia – and the Internet more broadly – is the continuing progress we are seeing in reducing the costs of communication technology, such that it will reach the entire planet in relatively short order. Just think about what happens when the next billion people come online, and the next two billion after that.
Knowledge isn't always used to make people better off, of course. It can be used to make more lethal weaponry and more effective militia and armies – so we must couple knowledge with humanism, with universal sympathy, for it to be a force for good. Without knowledge, however, all the sympathy in the world would be impotent – they must exist together.
Your attention hasn't collapsed, it's been stolen from you by big forces. Once we understand those forces, we can begin to build meaningful solutions.
Our body is a community of cells, in which each cell occupies a place appropriate for its tasks on behalf of the whole. Cancer cells, however, are rogues that trespass aggressively into other tissues. Metastasis is what makes cancer so lethal.
For me it is extremely important that commercial interests and social benefits are not mutually exclusive, but that they can complement each other wonderfully so I always look out for products that are innovative, forward-thinking and offer a true value for society.
In our culture, particularly in the last 300-500 years in Western culture, people have become much more ambivalent to ecstatic experiences. The idea of losing control is seen as dangerous and shameful... We're a culture that's very much about individual autonomy, and ecstasy is the opposite of that – it's about surrendering control.
My father taught me an important lesson; when you get something, when you receive something, it's important to give back. This lesson is something that has really stuck with me through my whole life.
I flew home with this profound sense of the simultaneity of human suffering; I've never been able to get over that sense that even as I'm talking to you right now, there are people who are living unbearable lives.